In-Network With Most Commercial Insurers
*Please note that at this time, we are not in network with Medicaid/Medi-Cal
Comprehensive Mental Health Treatment for Teens Ages 12–17
Disordered eating in adolescents takes many forms: restrictive patterns, emotional eating, rigid food rules, body image distress, eating that’s become tied to anxiety or depression. For some teens, these patterns are an early warning that something deeper needs attention. For others, they have developed alongside an existing mental health picture — a teen managing depression or trauma whose relationship with food has become one more place the difficulty shows up.
Muir Wood’s program is built for teens whose mental health has reached a point where weekly outpatient therapy isn’t enough — and whose disordered eating is part of that broader clinical picture rather than the primary diagnosis. Our work focuses on the underlying emotional and psychological conditions: trauma, depression, anxiety, self-harm, substance use, and the patterns of self-criticism and emotional dysregulation that often drive disordered eating in the first place. As those underlying conditions stabilize, the disordered eating patterns often begin to shift alongside them.
Our Healing Environment in California
Muir Wood’s residential campuses are set in serene, nature-rich environments across California — in Sonoma County, the Central Valley near Clovis, and Southern California’s Riverside area. Small, home-like residences, structured daily rhythms, balanced meals together, and distance from the specific triggers and patterns of home life give teens space to engage with treatment. Our gender-separate campuses reduce social distraction, and our multidisciplinary team provides 24/7 clinical support.
For teens whose disordered eating has been shaped by social media comparisons, peer pressure, family dynamics, or the relentless stress of adolescent life, the structured residential environment itself supports healing. Regular meals at regular times, eaten with peers in a non-judgmental setting, begin to interrupt the eating patterns that have built up at home.
What Muir Wood Does and Doesn’t Provide
Eating-related treatment is a broad area, and the appropriate level of care depends on the specific clinical picture. To help families find the right fit, here’s what Muir Wood’s scope of care includes and what falls outside it.
What we provide
- Residential and intensive outpatient mental health treatment for teens ages 12–17
- Evidence-based psychotherapy for depression, anxiety, trauma, self-harm, suicidal ideation, and substance use
- Clinical work on the emotional patterns that often drive disordered eating — self-criticism, perfectionism, or needs for control, emotional dysregulation, body image distress, and the use of food behaviors as coping
- Structured, balanced meals in a stable food environment, eaten together with peers and staff
- Psychiatric evaluation and medication management for co-occurring mental health conditions, when clinically indicated
- Family therapy, parent education, and ongoing family programming to support the home environment teens return to
- Coordination with outpatient providers, including any dietitians or specialty eating disorder clinicians the teen is working with outside Muir Wood
What falls outside our scope
- Primary specialty eating disorder treatment for teens whose primary diagnosis is anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, ARFID, or binge eating disorder
- Medical stabilization for teens experiencing severe restriction, refeeding risk, electrolyte instability, or other medical complications of an eating disorder
- Dietitian-led nutritional rehabilitation, meal planning, calorie monitoring, or weight restoration protocols
- Specialty eating disorder protocols such as formal Family-Based Treatment (FBT/Maudsley) or higher-acuity ED-specific behavioral monitoring
If you’re unsure whether Muir Wood is the right fit for your teen, please call our admissions team. We’d rather have an honest conversation about your teen’s clinical picture and help you find the right program than admit a teen whose needs would be better met somewhere else. When the fit isn’t right with us, we help families understand what level of care to look for and can offer guidance toward specialty providers in the eating disorder treatment community.
Understanding Disordered Eating in Teens
Disordered Eating vs. Eating Disorders
The terms “disordered eating” and “eating disorder” are related but not the same. Eating disorders are specific clinical diagnoses defined in the DSM-5 — anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder, ARFID, and others — with specific criteria around behaviors, weight changes, medical complications, and psychological features. Disordered eating is a broader category describing patterns of eating, food-related thoughts, and body image distress that fall short of a formal eating disorder diagnosis but are clinically meaningful and often deeply affecting daily life.
Disordered eating exists on a spectrum. At one end, it might look like rigid food rules, occasional restriction, or anxiety around eating in front of others. At the other, it can begin shading toward the threshold of a clinical eating disorder. Where a particular teen sits on that spectrum is a clinical judgment, and that judgment shapes what kind of treatment is most appropriate.
Common Disordered Eating Patterns in Adolescents
- Restrictive patterns: Skipping meals, calorie counting, cutting out food groups, eating significantly less than the body needs — often tied to a desire for control or to body image distress.
- Emotional eating: Using food to soothe difficult emotions, eating in response to stress or sadness rather than hunger, or feeling unable to stop eating once started.
- Rigid rules and rituals around food.: “Good” and “bad” food categories, anxiety when eating outside the rules, mealtime rituals that have to be performed in a specific way.
- Body checking and body image distress: Frequent mirror-checking, weighing, comparing one’s body to others, persistent dissatisfaction or disgust with one’s body.
- Compensatory behaviors: Excessive exercise to “offset” eating, using laxatives, or other behaviors intended to compensate for food intake.
- Avoidant patterns: Avoiding eating with others, refusing certain textures or food categories beyond typical adolescent preference, or significant social withdrawal around mealtimes.
These patterns can develop in any teen. They are particularly common in teens who are also navigating depression, anxiety, trauma responses, social pressures, perfectionism, or substance use. The behaviors and the underlying mental health usually reinforce each other.
How Disordered Eating Affects Mental Health and Daily Life
Even when disordered eating doesn’t meet the threshold for a clinical eating disorder, it can take a real toll. The mental energy that goes into food rules, body monitoring, and managing eating-related anxiety is energy that isn’t available for school, friendships, or the developmental work of adolescence. Disordered eating is associated with elevated rates of depression, anxiety, social isolation, and self-harm. For teens whose disordered eating involves restriction, sleep, focus, mood regulation, and basic energy can all be affected by inadequate nutrition.
Without specialized treatment, BDD in adolescents often worsens over time. Research shows that untreated BDD is associated with high rates of depression, social withdrawal, school refusal, and suicidal ideation—with some studies reporting that suicidal ideation occurs in up to 80% of individuals with BDD.¹˅⁸ The condition is not self-limiting. It requires professional intervention, and the earlier that intervention begins, the better the prognosis.
Disordered eating also rarely stays static. Without intervention, patterns tend to deepen over time, and what started as occasional restriction or emotional eating can develop into more significant behaviors. This is part of why we encourage families to take early signs seriously rather than waiting to see if things resolve on their own.
When Disordered Eating Requires Professional Mental Health Treatment
When Is It More Than Typical Adolescent Eating Variability?
Adolescent eating naturally varies. Teenagers go through phases of bigger and smaller appetites, sudden dietary preferences, growth-related fluctuations, and changing relationships with food and body. Not every period of unusual eating is a clinical concern. The line between typical adolescent variability and clinically meaningful disordered eating usually involves several of the following:
- Patterns persist for weeks or months, not days
- The teen experiences significant distress around food, weight, or body image
- Eating patterns are interfering with daily life — school, social activities, energy, sleep, or family meals
- Other mental health symptoms are present alongside the eating patterns — depression, anxiety, self-harm, substance use
- The teen has tried to change the patterns and cannot
- Family meals or food at home have become a source of regular conflict or distress
When several of these are present, a clinical assessment is warranted. The assessment helps determine what kind of treatment is most appropriate and at what level of intensity.
Warning Signs a Teen May Need Residential Treatment
Most teens with disordered eating patterns can be supported through outpatient therapy and family work. Residential treatment becomes the appropriate level of care when:
- Outpatient therapy has not produced meaningful progress over an extended period
- Co-occurring conditions — severe depression, self-harm, suicidal ideation, substance use, trauma responses — are complicating the clinical picture
- Daily functioning has deteriorated to the point that school attendance, basic self-care, or safe functioning at home is no longer sustainable
- Family dynamics around food and eating have reached a level of conflict that requires concentrated work in a structured setting
- Crisis-level mental health symptoms are present and require 24/7 supervision
Important: Residential treatment for disordered eating at Muir Wood is appropriate when the broader mental health picture warrants residential care. For teens whose eating disorder behaviors themselves require medical stabilization, intensive nutritional rehabilitation, or specialty ED protocols, a primary eating disorder treatment program is usually the better fit. Our admissions team can help families think through which level and type of care matches their teen’s needs.
Disordered Eating and Co-Occurring Mental Health Conditions
For most teens we treat, disordered eating doesn’t exist in isolation. Common co-occurring conditions include:
Depression: Often closely intertwined with disordered eating — either feeding the patterns or feeding off them.
Anxiety: Generalized anxiety, social anxiety, and OCD-spectrum patterns frequently overlap with rigid food rules and body checking.
Trauma: A history of trauma, particularly involving the body, often shapes eating and body-related distress in adolescence.
Self-harm and suicidal ideation: Disordered eating and other self-harming behaviors often occur together.
Substance use: Substances may be used to manage emotional weight or to suppress appetite.
Perfectionism and high-pressure environments: Academic pressure, athletics, and social comparison often play a role in how disordered eating develops.
Our integrated treatment model addresses these conditions together rather than as separate tracks. Working on the underlying mental health is, for many teens, what creates the conditions for the disordered eating patterns to begin shifting.
Our Evidence-Based Approach to Treatment
Treatment at Muir Wood is built around evidence-based modalities adapted to the developmental needs of adolescents. For teens whose disordered eating is part of a broader mental health picture, the clinical work focuses on the underlying conditions — depression, anxiety, trauma, substance use — while also providing the structured environment and emotional support that begins to interrupt the eating-related patterns.
Individual Therapy
Each teen receives at least two individual sessions per week in residential care, led by our team of therapists and recovery counselors. The therapeutic relationship is the foundation of treatment — a space where teens can speak honestly about the experiences, thoughts, and patterns that have shaped their relationship with food and body. For teens with disordered eating, individual therapy is often where the most personal material gets processed: body image, family dynamics around food, perfectionism, the emotional functions food behaviors are serving.
Group Therapy
Group therapy gives teens an experience individual sessions cannot — the recognition that other teens are working through similar challenges. For teens with disordered eating, hearing peers describe similar struggles with body image, food rules, or emotional eating reduces the shame and isolation these patterns almost always carry. Our groups are led by experienced adolescent clinicians and intentionally sized to be supportive rather than overwhelming.
Psychiatric Evaluation and Medication Management
Some teens benefit from psychiatric medication for co-occurring depression, anxiety, or other mental health conditions. At Muir Wood, our psychiatric team follows a non-ideological, least-necessary approach: medication is used only when clinically indicated, always in combination with therapy, and always in close collaboration with families. Medication is not used to treat the disordered eating itself — it’s used, when appropriate, to address the co-occurring mental health conditions that may be feeding the eating patterns.
Trauma-Informed Mental Health Care
Many teens with disordered eating have a trauma history. The relationship between trauma and disordered eating is well documented — eating behaviors often develop as ways to manage overwhelming emotional experiences or to create a sense of control after experiences in which control was lost. Our trauma-informed approach treats these patterns as protective rather than pathological, even as we help teens build better tools.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
CBT is one of the foundational evidence-based approaches we use, particularly for the cognitive and behavioral patterns that drive disordered eating — black-and-white thinking about food and body, perfectionism, the cognitive distortions that fuel body image distress, and the behavioral patterns of restriction, rule-following, or emotional eating. CBT is integrated into individual therapy and group programming throughout treatment.
Family Therapy and Parent Support
Family therapy, conducted weekly by your teen’s primary therapist, addresses the specific dynamics at play in your family — including how meals are handled at home, how body and food are talked about (or avoided), and how parents can support a teen’s recovery without becoming the food police. This work is not about assigning blame. It’s about giving families clearer ways of being with each other around what has often become a fraught area of family life.
Twice-weekly parent education classes and a weekly parent support group provide additional spaces for parents to learn, connect with peers, and process their own experience. By the time your teen returns home, both you and your teen will have built skills on parallel tracks — your teen through their individualized clinical work, you through family therapy, education, and peer support.
Treatment Options at Muir Wood
Residential Treatment in California
Our residential program provides 24/7 clinical support in structured, home-like campuses across California. Residential is the appropriate level of care for teens whose mental health has reached a point where outpatient isn’t enough, when self-harm or suicidal ideation is present, when daily functioning has broken down, or when the immersive nature of residential treatment is needed to interrupt patterns that home environments have been reinforcing. The typical residential stay ranges from 45 to 60 days, with some stays extending to 90 days depending on clinical progress and insurance authorization.
Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP)
Our IOP is appropriate as a step-down from residential treatment or as a primary level of care for teens whose mental health needs are significant but who can safely remain at home. IOP includes group therapy, individual sessions, and family involvement several days a week — more structure than weekly outpatient therapy, less intensity than residential. IOP locations in Petaluma and Clovis serve teens across Northern and Central California.
Continuing Care and Aftercare Planning
Treatment doesn’t end at discharge. Our 16-week aftercare coaching program supports families through the critical transition home, when the return to school, peer environments, and daily routines puts the gains of treatment to the test. Aftercare coaches help teens apply the skills they’ve built and help parents navigate the predictable challenges that arise as the teen reintegrates into life at home.
Our Continuum of Care
We believe strong outcomes depend on continuity and collaboration. From admission through discharge, we coordinate closely with your teen’s existing providers and aftercare programs — whether that’s our IOP or another trusted outpatient partner. Our team stays in regular communication with the broader care network to support timely transitions, shared understanding, and a clear path forward.
For teens whose families are also working with outside dietitians or specialty eating disorder clinicians, we coordinate with those providers as part of the broader treatment picture. Care that crosses programs is most effective when the providers are talking to each other, not when each works in isolation.
The Muir Wood Teen Difference
Our team partners closely with parents and caregivers from day one — clear updates, a personalized plan, and real-world tools you can use between sessions — so your teen can move toward stability, well-being, and lasting wellness alongside peers facing similar challenges.
Some of our key differentiators include:
Specialists in Adolescent Care
Everything we do is built for teens ages 12–17, not adapted from adult models. Our team includes adolescent psychiatrists and psychiatric nurse practitioners (PMHNPs), highly trained therapists, nurses, educators, and recovery counselors who specialize exclusively in adolescent mental health and substance use treatment. Working as an integrated team, they deliver evidence-based, developmentally appropriate care tailored to each teen’s unique needs.
Environments That Foster Connection and Growth
In serene, nature-rich settings, our campuses are unlike any other. With 24/7 care, teens spend their days as part of a broader community — engaging in therapy, academics, and outdoor activities that strengthen resilience and self-awareness. At night, they return to home-like residences to process, decompress, and connect with others. This balance of community and intimacy creates a unique healing environment where every moment becomes a part of the recovery process.
Expertise in Primary Mental Health + Substance Use
With expertise in treating both primary mental health and co-occurring substance use challenges, our trauma-informed approach helps teens heal deeply and build lasting change. We focus on the whole person — addressing both emotional well-being and underlying behavioral patterns — to support lifelong healing.
Support for the Whole Family
Healing doesn’t happen in isolation — it happens together. At Muir Wood, families stay actively involved through therapy, education, and a 16-week aftercare coaching program that builds trust, communication, and stability long after treatment ends.
Accessible, High-Quality Care Covered by Insurance
Muir Wood is committed to removing financial barriers to care by partnering with most major insurance providers, ensuring families can access high-quality, evidence-based treatment when it matters most.
Educational Support that Restores Confidence
Through our WASC-accredited academic program, students continue their education with personalized support. Success in the classroom becomes a vital step in restoring confidence, structure, and a sense of possibility.
Continuum of Care
We coordinate closely with your teen’s existing providers and aftercare programs — whether that’s our own IOP, another outpatient program, your teen’s existing therapist, or a care infrastructure we help arrange when one isn’t yet in place. For teens stepping into or out of Muir Wood residential care, shared clinical philosophy and close communication ensure progress continues without interruption.
Speak With a Teen Treatment Specialist
Connect with our admissions team today to learn how Muir Wood can support your family.
Start the Conversation
If your teen is struggling and you’re trying to understand what comes next, our admissions team is available to listen, answer your questions, and help you understand whether Muir Wood is the right fit for your family’s situation. If we’re not the right program for your teen, we’ll tell you that honestly and help you think about where to look. There’s no pressure and no obligation — just a real conversation about what your teen needs right now.
Frequently Asked Questions
Muir Wood is not a primary specialty eating disorder treatment program. We treat teens whose disordered eating patterns are part of a broader mental health picture — depression, anxiety, trauma, self-harm, substance use — and whose level of care needs are mental health rather than primarily medical or nutritional. For teens whose primary diagnosis is anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, ARFID, or binge eating disorder, and whose treatment needs include medical stabilization, weight restoration, or specialty ED protocols, a dedicated eating disorder treatment program is usually the better fit. If you’re unsure where your teen falls, please call our admissions team — we’d rather have an honest conversation about your teen’s clinical picture than admit a teen whose needs would be better met somewhere else.